Mike is recognised for his pioneering work in Lean, Agile, and Kanban, his advocacy for participatory and outcome-oriented approaches to change, transformation, and strategy, and his relational approach to organisation. Author of the Lean-Agile classic Kanban from the Inside (2014), Mike has written a number of books for audiences in the Agile and business agility space – most recently, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (2025). Prior to his consulting career, he was global development manager and Executive Director at a top-tier investment bank, CTO for an energy risk management startup, and interim delivery manager for two of the UK government's digital ‘exemplar’ projects. His focus now, as the founder of Agendashift, is on wholehearted, deliberately adaptive organisations and the transformational leadership that enables them.

Thinking organisationally about process

Around the time I was writing my first book, Kanban from the Inside (2014), much of my day job involved Kanban training – mostly private training, and from time to time, training other trainers. Leaning on my past career in management (previous roles included Executive Director and CTO), I would encourage those taking my class to “think organisationally”. I would get a lot of blank looks; I had a strong gut feeling about something important, but somehow lacked the words (or as it would turn out, the models) to explain it.

Now that my fifth book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (2025) is out, I can say with confidence what “thinking organisationally” really means. In a nutshell, it’s about engaging with the relationships between different aspects of the organisation and caring about how well they are working. That’s a huge topic – the number of relationships you might engage with there can be enormous – but today we will explore what it means in a context familiar to most conference attendees, your kanban board and the process that it represents.

Make your own Outside-in Service Delivery Review

At a meetup, I was asked what I would do if I could implement only one thing. Ten years ago, I might have answered with “Validation”; today, my answer is the OI-SDR. It’s a piece of deliberate organisation design, one that builds in the strong organisational expectation that learning will be happening – learning about our customers and learning about ourselves. An opportunity for double loop learning. And to do it justice, you’ll soon be practicing validation anyway! This workshop will take you through all the steps of that design process.